1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to systems and method for providing data transmission, and in particular, to systems and method for providing accelerated transmission of data, such as financial data and news feeds, over a communication channel using data compression and decompression to provide secure data transfer and effectively increase the bandwidth of the communication channel and/or reduce the latency of data transmission.
2. Description of Related Art:
The financial information services industry covers a broad range of financial information ranging from basic stock quotations to analyst reports to detailed pricing of callable bonds. Users of financial information can generally be divided into two segments—Information users and Analytics users. Information users range from non-finance business professionals to curious stock market investors and tend to seek basic financial information and data. Analytical users on the other hand, tend to be finance professionals who require more arcane financial information and utilize sophisticated analytical tools to manipulate and analyze data (e.g. for writing option contracts).
Historically, proprietary systems, such as Bloomberg, Reuters and Bridge Information, have been the primary electronic source for financial information to both the informational and analytical users. These closed systems required dedicated telecommunications lines and product-specific hardware. The most typical installations are land-based networking solutions such as T1 or ISDN, and satellite-based “wireless” solutions at speeds of 384 kbps.
Latency of financial data and news is critical to the execution of financial transactions. Indeed the more timely receipt of financial data from various sources including the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange, National Association of Securities Dealers (NASDAQ), Options Exchange, Commodities Exchanges, and Futures presents a fundamental advantage to those who trade. Latency is induced by the long time taken to compress and encrypt data prior to transmission, along with the associated time to decrypt and decompress. Often current methods of encryption and compression take as much or substantially more time than the actual time to transmit the uncompressed, unencrypted data. Thus one problem within the current art is the latency induced by the act of encryption, compression, decryption, and decompression.
Modern data compression algorithms suffer from poor compression, high latency, or both. Within the present art algorithms such as Lempel-Ziv, modified/embellished Lempel-Ziv, Binary Arithmetic, and Huffman coding are essentially generic algorithm having a varied effectiveness on different data types. Also small increases in compression to the negentropy limit of the data generally require exponentially greater periods of time and substantially higher latency. Generic algorithms are currently utilized as data types and content format is constantly changed within the financial industry. Many changes are gradual however there are also abrupt changes, such as the recent switch to decimalization that has imposed substantial requirements on data transmission bandwidth infrastructure within the financial industry. Thus another problem within the current art is the high latency and poor compression due to the use of generic data compression algorithms on financial data and news feeds.
Within the financial and news feeds, data is often segregated into packets for transmission. Further, in inquiry response type systems, as found in many financial research systems, the size of request packets and also response packets is quite small. As such, response servers often wait for long periods of time (for example 500 msec) to aggregate data packets prior to transmission back to the inquirer. By aggregating the data and then applying compression, higher compression ratios are often achieved. This then translates to lower data communications costs or more customers served for a given amount of available communications bandwidth. Thus another problem within the current art is the substantial latency caused by aggregating data packets due to poor data compression efficiency and packet overhead.
Thus, given the importance of receiving financial information over computer networks, an improved system and method for providing secure point-to-point solution for transparent multiplication of bandwidth over conventional communication channels is highly desirable.
These and other limitations within the current art are solved by the present invention.